Appointment audit guide

Creating and taking part in an audit is easy. Simply register, create an audit and invite
clinicians from your practice to take part. Following the audit you will have access to a detailed report of your audit results
benchmarked against the national average. Each clinician will also receive an individual report based on their own data.

This page describes the steps involved in creating, managing and taking part in an audit. Use the menu
on the left to jump to specific sections.

Registration

In order to create audits, you must register and create an account. Registration is quick and only requires an
email address, password and contact number.

Step through the sections on the registration form by entering each of your personal details and clicking next:

Setting a password

Your password should be at least 8 characters long, not contain your name and include a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols.
The password strength indicator will update as you type in your password. 'Password strength: Good' indicates an acceptable password.
A strong password is required to ensure only you can access audit details and reports.

Your username and password combination will be used to sign-in to your account.

Contact details

Your phone number will only ever be used should we need to contact you regarding an audit. We won't share your contact details.

Creating your account

When you have entered all of your details click register. An email will be sent to the address you provided containing instructions
on how to confirm your account.

Confirming your email address

We will need to confirm your email address before you can access your account. Following registration, you will receive an email
containing a link, simply click the link in the email to confirm your account.

Once you have confirmed your email address you will be able to sign-in and create an audit.

Didn't receive confirmation instructions?

If you have registered and not received an email to confirm your account you can request another confirmation email.
here

Check your spam or junk email folders in case your email been automatically moved. If you're still unable to complete registration,
contact us at admin@pcfaudit.co.uk.

Your account

Once you have registered and confirmed your email address, or been invited to take part in an audit and set a password, you will
be able to sign-in and access audits for your practice.

Updating your details

Creating an audit

Once you have registered you can create an avoidable appointments audit for your practice. When you sign-in you will be taken
to a page that lists all of your active and past audits. Use the 'Create Audit' button to create a new audit.

If you create an audit you will be responsible for inviting participants and managing the audit.

Selecting a practice to audit

Use the drop down to select your practice. Start to type in your practice name or practice code to produce a list
of practices to select from.

A practice can only have one live audit at any one time.

Set an audit end date reminder

You can set an end date reminder for the audit; on this date you will receive an email reminding you to close the audit. You can
then choose to close the audit or keep it running. The decision to close the audit should be influenced by the number of appointment responses
you have collected; more responses will result in a more accurate and insightful audit report. We recommend waiting until you have
over 150 responses before closing the audit.

You can use the drop down to pick a future date, or enter a specific date:

Create the audit

Once you have entered the practice you are auditing and set an end date reminder you can create your audit. You will then be
taken to the audit dashboard where you can invite participants and manage the audit.

Only the person who creates the audit can access the audit dashboard and manage the audit.

Inviting and managing participants

You can invite, track and remove participants from the audit dashboard.

Inviting participants

Use the invite form on the audit dashboard to invite participants.

Enter the participants name, email address and skill type. Each participant will receive an email
invitation to join the audit. The email will contain a link which they can click to set a password and
create their account (if the user does not already exist).

The email invitation will be sent instantly for each participant as they are added. Only add participants when
you are ready for them to start submitting appointment responses.

Removing a participant

You can remove participants from the audit by selecting the participants details row and clicking 'Remove Participant'.

Participants can only be removed if they have not already joined the audit.

Monitor participants

You can view details for each participant on the audit dashboard. Click on the participants name to reveal their details.
Here you can see the users status, number of appointment responses and when they last submitted an audit response.

Participant status

You can see each participants status in their details on the audit dashboard. Each status is explained below:

Unconfirmed - the user has not yet clicked the link in their invitation email to confirm their account

Pending - the user has confirmed their account but not logged in and joined the audit.

Active - the user has joined the audit

Complete - the user has chosen to end their data collection. A note will indicate if the user completed the reflection questions
at the end of their audit.

If a participant clicked the link in their invitation email but did not set a password they will need to use the 'forgot your password'
process to set a new password before they can sign-in.

Monitoring the audit

You can see information relating to your practice audit on the audit dashboard.

Audit Dashboard

The audit dashboard shows your audit details along with a list of participants for the audit. At the top of the page you can find
the practice you are auditing, audit end date reminder and audit status.

Summary information for each participant is shown in the audit participants section. Click on the users row to reveal more information
such as participant skill, responses and last response. You can also email the participant directly using the email link. This will open up a new email
in your default email software.

Tip: use the response count and last response details to track individual participants. You can then email users directly to keep them engaged with the audit.

Closing the audit

When you are ready to close the audit you can do so from the audit dashboard.

Clicking the 'Close Audit' button will immediately close the practice audit.

To get the most out of your practice audit, we recommend only closing the audit when you have over 150 responses, with a good response count across individual participants.

When you close the audit each participant will receive an email informing them that they can no longer submit responses. When the user logs in they will be asked
to complete their audit reflection questions if they haven't done so already. They will then have access to their individual audit report.

Once you have closed the audit you will have access to the practice audit report and data download. These can be found using the relevant buttons on the audit dashboard, the buttons
will only appear when the audit is closed.

If you need the audit to be re-opened please contact us at admin@pcfaudit.co.uk. We can re-open the audit so further responses can be
submitted.

Only participants who had not ended their data submission will be able to submit further responses.

Access to the practice audit report and data download will be revoked until the audit is closed again.

Audit report

Once the audit is closed you can access the audit report from the audit dashboard:

Clicking the button will open the audit report where you can view the results for your practice.

Download audit data

You can download details of each individual appointment response once the audit is closed. This can be done from the audit dashboard.

Data will be downloaded to a csv file, and will contain full details of each appointment response, allowing for further analysis of the practice results. The file includes:

Audit ID - the unique reference ID for your audit.

Practice - the practice that has been audited.

Audit created - the date the audit was created on the system.

Audit status - open or closed. This will always be 'closed' for data downloads.

Participant - the clinicians name as stated on the invite.

Skill group - skill group of the clinician, this is used for reporting to separate GP's, nurses and other clinicians.

Skill - the clinicians skill as stated on the invite.

Participant status - individual status which can be used to track completion of reflection questions. More here.

Avoidable - flags if the appointment was classified as avoidable.

Reason category - the category of the avoidable/unavoidable reason. This is used for reporting.

Reason - the reason stated as to why the appointment was avoidable or unavoidable.

Comments - any comments added by the clinician for the appointment.

Response date and time - the date and time of the appointment response.

Taking part in an audit

This section describes what to expect when taking part in an audit, how to accept invites, submit data, end data submissions and view reports.

Audit invite

You will receive an invite to take part in an audit at the email address specified by your practice manager or audit lead when they setup the audit for your practice. The
invite email will contain a link to the site, clicking the link will take you to a page where you can set a password and finish creating your account.

Setting a password

After following the link on the invite email you will be able to set a password and edit your name if necessary before creating an account. Use the password helper text
to set a strong password for the site. When you have finished creating your account you will be able to login using your email address and new password.

If you have clicked the link in the email invitation and NOT set a password you will need to use the forgot your password process to set a new password before you
can login and take part in an audit.

Audit welcome

When you have set a password and created your account you will be able to login using your email address and password. When logging in for the first time you will be taken
to a welcome screen for your practice audit which gives a brief introduction to the audit and how to take part. When you are ready to start submitting appointment responses,
simply click the 'Start the audit' button. You will then be taken to a screen where you can submit appointment responses.

Submitting appointment responses

For each appointment you will be asked if you thought the appointment was avoidable or unavoidable. This should be based on how you think general practice COULD be, not
necessarily how it is today.

When you click avoidable or unavoidable you will be presented with a list of reasons as to why you think the appointment could have been avoided, or why it was unavoidable. Simply
click the most relevant reason on the page, or select 'other'. These reasons are used in the audit report and highlight specific areas or processes within your practice worth exploring
further to make improvements following the audit.

Finally, you can add comments relating to the audit itself. Once complete, click 'Next Appointment', this will submit the data for the last appointment and move you back to the top
of the page to start a response for your next appointment.

Ending your audit

When you have used the tool for two or three sessions and provided results for perhaps 50 appointments
you can click the ‘I have finished submitting data to this audit’ link.

Once you have ended your appointment audit you will not be able to submit any further appointment responses.

Reflection questions

When you have ended your audit, you will be taken to a page where you can complete a few audit reflection questions. These are designed, now that you have been thinking
about which sorts of cases might be avoidable in the future, to capture a few key priorities. Four are simple multiple-choice questions and two are free text.

On the multiple-choice questions select your top 3 answers ranked in order of priority, highest to lowest. You can also select 'other' and enter your own suggestion. Three different
answers must be specified for each of the multiple-choice questions.

You report

Once you have completed the reflection questions you will be presented with a report showing your audit results and how you compare to nationally to other GP's. The report can
be viewed online or downloaded as a pdf and printed.

My audits

When you log in to the system you will usually be taken to the audit dashboard or to the appointment response screen. If you have more than one live audit or have had
previous audits that you want to review you can view all audits associated with your account using the 'My audits' link on the top navigation bar.

This page shows all of the audits that you have created or participated in. You can also use the button on this page to create a new audit.

Only audits created on the PCF Audit system will be listed here. Details of audits from the old audit system will not be available.